Hands on with Intel’s MeeGo tablet UI: good ideas, rough edges

Intel has unveiled its MeeGo tablet user experience. We downloaded the …

Although Nokia is gutting its commitment to MeeGo, the platform still has support from a number of other prominent hardware vendors. Intel, which originally cofounded MeeGo with Nokia last year, has released an experimental "pre-alpha" build of its MeeGo tablet environment.

The software was unveiled at Mobile World Congress this week and is being demonstrated on the Atom-based ExpoPC tablet. It is built with Nokia's Qt development toolkit and uses the powerful Qt Quick framework for much of the user interface. It appears to be at a relatively early stage of development and is still lacking a lot of basic capabilities, but many of the underlying concepts are promising.

In addition to demoing the environment at Mobile World Congress, Intel has also released a binary-only system image that will allow testers to run the MeeGo tablet environment on their own hardware. I installed it myself on a Lenovo S10-3T, the convertible netbook tablet device that Intel gave to developers at the MeeGo Summit last year.

The MeeGo Tablet experience consists of a home screen, a settings panel, and a handful of simplistic media and productivity tools. The home screen displays vertical columns with interactive content, including application launchers, social networking messages from the user's friends, recently-visited websites, and recent music, photos, and videos.

The environment's basic performance and interface responsiveness is acceptable, but falls down under heavy load. Sliding the home screen back and forth was smooth and seamless. The system got bogged down quickly, however, when navigating between multiple open applications. With several programs open, the shell regularly hangs. I wasn't able to capture any screenshots—even after getting the ImageMagick command line tools installed via command line—because task switching interface was too wobbly.

The user interface is largely touch-friendly, but gesture-based interaction isn't yet supported pervasively throughout the software—the image viewer has support for pinch-zooming, but the custom Web browser does not.

The bundled applications have extremely minimal functionality and a lot of major feature gaps, but are complete enough to illustrate that the underlying Qt toolkit is a viable foundation for a tablet software platform. The "pre-alpha" label is appropriately descriptive of the software's status. It's definitely not as mature as the MeeGo handset or netbook user experience stacks. In fact, it's not even quite as polished yet as the original "pre-alpha" prototype that was unveiled last June.

The interface will likely see considerable improvement by Intel and third-party developers before it ships on actual hardware. It's not clear yet, however, when it's actually expected to ship.

The on-screen keyboard is quite good—it functioned well on the Lenovo touchscreen and didn't miss key presses. It appears to have been licensed from Swype, a company that develops sophisticated predictive keyboard technology. I'm a big fan of Swype's keyboard and regard it as a must-have feature for touchscreen phones, but its usefulness diminishes on the tablet form factor. As we explained in our review of the Swype-enabled Galaxy Tab, Swype doesn't scale well to larger on-screen keyboards where it's faster for the user to type with both hands rather than using Swype's gesture-based approach.

One of the key aspects of MeeGo that sets it apart from Android and other Linux-based mobile efforts is a higher commitment to transparency, vendor neutrality, and inclusive development. The MeeGo developer community expects critical platform components to be created in the open with a process that allows outside participation.

Contrary to this approach, Intel has been developing this new tablet interface behind closed doors without the involvement of other MeeGo stakeholders or community members. It's at an early stage of development, however, so there is still time for Intel to publish the source code and transition the project to a suitably open model. The binary-only release of a testing image is a welcome start, but it's no substitute for real access to the source code.

It's likely that the tablet interface preview was made available now in order to help Intel attract commercial third-party developers to the MeeGo platform. The company has started courting developers by publishing documentation and announcing a contest through which the earliest developers to publish MeeGo software in Intel's AppUp store will be able to win cash prizes.

Intel's unveiling of the MeeGo tablet user experience is a timely reminder to the industry that the MeeGo platform is still moving on despite Nokia's high-profile defection. It puts some technical weight behind Intel's recent statement affirming the company's commitment to the mobile operating system. Intel's ongoing support for MeeGo is applauded by the enthusiast community, but it might not be enough to convince commercial application developers. Without the backing of OEMs and hardware companies that are interested in shipping actual mainstream products, it's unlikely that MeeGo's opportunities will resonate with many developers.

For more details and photos of the tablet user experience, you can refer to Intel's MeeGo developer website. To test the tablet software on your own hardware, you can download Intel's platform preview image.